Billy Crudup has played complicated men for nearly three decades, but the actor admits he rarely works in the full Method style. So when Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly required a breakdown in the middle of a bar – tears rolling as he read the words “truffle parmesan fries” – he had to dig into techniques he had avoided since drama school.
While talking to The Independent, the actor said, “It turns out re-traumatising yourself works.” The scene shows Crudup’s character, Timothy, a therapist who never “made it” as an actor, performing for George Clooney, a fading movie star.
Billy Crudup on Method acting
Crudup says he needed genuine pain to make the moment crack open, even though he has long believed spontaneity beats immersion.
His issue with Method acting comes down to how it affects the room. If a director needs to give a quick adjustment, he said, things can get tense. “You can’t just say, ‘Sorry, Daniel (Day-Lewis), can you step outside of that for one second?’ To the other actors and crew, it feels selfish.” He laughed at the memory of clashes on past sets, adding that he never liked being tricked into reactions – even when directors tried. William Friedkin firing a gun during The Exorcist? “It’s a great f***ing moment. But… generally speaking, no, that’s a bad idea,” Crudup said.
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A career built on inscrutable men – and lingering doubts
Crudup has spent years slipping into characters audiences cannot quite decode: CIA agents, stone-faced captains, slippery executives. Yet he is blunt about watching his early work. Much of it, he said, feels “not authentic,” even Almost Famous. The exception was Harry Clarke, his one-man play where he performed 19 characters and finally felt, in his words, “in control of the text” and unburdened by self-consciousness.
Now, the actor stars in Eric Roth’s High Noon adaptation, playing Will Kane, a marshal forced into a showdown that challenges both his masculinity and his marriage. Crudup said the story’s tension lands differently today. “We’re wrestling right now with how to create civility in what is becoming an increasingly lawless community. You can’t have government officials systematically disobeying laws with no accountability from Congress, and no application of force by the Supreme Court, and it not be somewhat lawless,” he explained, pointing to officials who ignore laws without consequence. Kane, he added, is “a bully, but he’s a bully for the law.”
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Fame, politics and a grounded worldview
Crudup joked that for years, he only got recognised when he stood next to his wife, Naomi Watts. But he is clear-eyed about the pitfalls of fame. He quoted former American President Jimmy Carter’s speech and said, “And it was kind of a ‘Come to Jesus’ sort of thing with America and its conscience, saying, ‘If you guys keep going after obtaining things, you’re going to forget what the purpose of living is.’” “That’s how I feel about fame,” he explained.
